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Intellectual property
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Intellectual property refers to creations of the intellect for which a monopoly is assigned to designated owners by law. Intellectual property rights are the protections granted to the creators of IP, and include trademarks, copyright, patents, industrial design rights, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets. Artistic works including music and literature, as well as discoveries, inventions, words, phrases, symbols, the Statute of Monopolies and the British Statute of Anne are seen as the origins of patent law and copyright respectively, firmly establishing the concept of intellectual property. The first known use of the intellectual property dates to 1769. The first clear example of modern usage goes back as early as 1808, the German equivalent was used with the founding of the North German Confederation whose constitution granted legislative power over the protection of intellectual property to the confederation. According to Lemley, it was only at point that the term really began to be used in the United States. The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I for monopoly privileges, the evolution of patents from royal prerogative to common-law doctrine. The term can be used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown. The statement that discoveries are. property goes back earlier, in Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846. Until recently, the purpose of property law was to give as little protection as possible in order to encourage innovation. Historically, therefore, they were granted only when they were necessary to encourage invention, limited in time, the concepts origins can potentially be traced back further. In 500 BCE, the government of the Greek state of Sybaris offered one years patent to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury. Intellectual property rights include patents, copyright, industrial design rights, trademarks, plant variety rights, trade dress, geographical indications, a copyright gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. Copyright may apply to a range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms. Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed, an industrial design right protects the visual design of objects that are not purely utilitarian. An industrial design consists of the creation of a shape, configuration or composition of pattern or color, or combination of pattern, an industrial design can be a two- or three-dimensional pattern used to produce a product, industrial commodity or handicraft. Plant breeders rights or plant variety rights are the rights to use a new variety of a plant. The variety must amongst others be novel and distinct and for registration the evaluation of propagating material of the variety is examined, a trademark is a recognizable sign, design or expression which distinguishes products or services of a particular trader from the similar products or services of other traders
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Software
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Computer software, or simply software, is that part of a computer system that consists of data or computer instructions, in contrast to the physical hardware from which the system is built. In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all information processed by computer systems, programs, computer software includes computer programs, libraries and related non-executable data, such as online documentation or digital media. Computer hardware and software require each other and neither can be used on its own. At the lowest level, executable code consists of machine language instructions specific to an individual processor—typically a central processing unit, a machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state. For example, an instruction may change the value stored in a storage location in the computer—an effect that is not directly observable to the user. An instruction may also cause something to appear on a display of the computer system—a state change which should be visible to the user. The processor carries out the instructions in the order they are provided, unless it is instructed to jump to a different instruction, the majority of software is written in high-level programming languages that are easier and more efficient for programmers, meaning closer to a natural language. High-level languages are translated into machine language using a compiler or an interpreter or a combination of the two, an outline for what would have been the first piece of software was written by Ada Lovelace in the 19th century, for the planned Analytical Engine. However, neither the Analytical Engine nor any software for it were ever created, the first theory about software—prior to creation of computers as we know them today—was proposed by Alan Turing in his 1935 essay Computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. This eventually led to the creation of the academic fields of computer science and software engineering. Computer science is more theoretical, whereas software engineering focuses on practical concerns. However, prior to 1946, software as we now understand it—programs stored in the memory of stored-program digital computers—did not yet exist, the first electronic computing devices were instead rewired in order to reprogram them. On virtually all platforms, software can be grouped into a few broad categories. There are many different types of software, because the range of tasks that can be performed with a modern computer is so large—see list of software. System software includes, Operating systems, which are collections of software that manage resources and provides common services for other software that runs on top of them. Supervisory programs, boot loaders, shells and window systems are parts of operating systems. In practice, an operating system bundled with additional software so that a user can potentially do some work with a computer that only has an operating system. Device drivers, which operate or control a particular type of device that is attached to a computer, utilities, which are computer programs designed to assist users in the maintenance and care of their computers
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Apache Software Foundation
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The Apache Software Foundation /əˈpætʃiː/ is an American non-profit corporation to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF was formed from the Apache Group and incorporated in Delaware, the Apache Software Foundation is a decentralized open source community of developers. The software they produce is distributed under the terms of the Apache License and is free, the Apache projects are characterized by a collaborative, consensus-based development process and an open and pragmatic software license. Each project is managed by a team of technical experts who are active contributors to the project. The ASF is a meritocracy, implying that membership of the foundation is granted only to volunteers who have contributed to Apache projects. The ASF is considered a second generation open-source organization, in that support is provided without the risk of platform lock-in. Among the ASFs objectives are, to legal protection to volunteers working on Apache projects. The ASF also holds several ApacheCon conferences each year, highlighting Apache projects, the history of the Apache Software Foundation is linked to the Apache HTTP Server, development beginning in February 1993. A group of eight developers started working on enhancing the NCSA HTTPd daemon and they came to be known as the Apache Group. On March 25,1999, the Apache Software Foundation was formed, the name Apache was chosen from respect for the Native American Apache Nation, well known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance. It also makes a pun on a patchy web server—a server made from a series of patches—but this was not its origin, the group of developers who released this new software soon started to call themselves the Apache Group. Apache divides its software development activities into separate areas called top-level projects. Unlike some other organizations that host FOSS projects, before a project is hosted at Apache it has to be licensed to the ASF with a grant or contributor agreement. In this way, the ASF gains the necessary intellectual property rights for the development, the ASF board of directors has responsibility for overseeing the ASFs activities and acting as a central point of contact and communication for its projects. The board assigns corporate issues, assigning resources to projects, and manages corporate services, including funds and it does not make technical decisions about individual projects, these are made by the individual Project Management Committees. With no employees and 2,663 volunteers, it spent $270,846 on infrastructure, $92,364 on public relations, Apache Attic Apache Incubator Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams. Official website ASF Projects Directory ASF Committer Directory General ASF Wiki ApacheCon website ApacheCon Wiki Apache popular APIs in GitHub
4.
Canonical (company)
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Canonical employs staff in more than 30 countries and maintains offices in London, Boston, Taipei, Shanghai, Tokyo and the Isle of Man. Canonical Ltd. has created and continues to back several projects, principally these are free and open-source software or tools designed to improve collaboration between free software developers and contributors. Some projects require a Contributor License Agreement to be signed. K, Canonical also claimed it would wait for the business to turn into a profitable one within another three to five years. Shuttleworth regarded Canonical as positioning itself as demand for services related to free software rose and this strategy has been compared to Red Hats business strategies in the 1990s. In an early 2009 New York Times article, Shuttleworth said that Canonicals revenue was creeping towards $30 million, however, as of 2013 the company was again in investment mode, making a $21.3 million loss as it invested in mobile. At the same time, the word Ubuntu was trademarked in connection with clothing, Canonical Group Ltd is located in London. Canonical USA Inc. is located in Lexington, Massachusetts, Canonical China Ltd is located in Shanghai. Canonical Brasil Ltda is located in São Paulo, Canonical Canada Ltd is located in Montreal. Canonical Ltd Taiwan Br. is located in Taipei, Canonical has more than 500 employees. The head office is in London, previously on the 27th floor of Millbank Tower, in the summer of 2006, Canonical opened an office in Montreal to house its global support and services operation. Taipei 101 is also home to a Canonical office, there is also an OEM team in Lexington, Massachusetts, United States. Bernard, was responsible for all major marketing deployments Stuart Langridge Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community leader Official website
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CyanogenMod
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CyanogenMod is a discontinued popular open-source operating system for smartphones and tablet computers, based on the Android mobile platform. Although the CyanogenMod name has been discontinued, rebranded development continues under the LineageOS name and it was developed as free and open source software based on the official releases of Android by Google, with added original and third-party code, and based on a rolling release development model. Although only a subset of total CyanogenMod users elect to report their use of the firmware, as of 23 March 2015 and it was also frequently used as a starting point by developers of other ROMs. In 2013, the founder, Steve Kondik, obtained venture funding under the name Cyanogen Inc, the code itself, being open source, has been forked under the name LineageOS and community efforts are in progress to resume development as a community project. CyanogenMod offers features and options not found in the official firmware distributed by mobile device vendors, CyanogenMod does not contain spyware or bloatware, according to its developers. CyanogenMod is also said to increase performance and reliability compared with official firmware releases, the name CyanogenMod derives from cyanogen + Mod. Soon after the introduction of HTC Dream mobile phone in September 2008, having root access, combined with the open source nature of the Android operating system, allowed the phones stock firmware to be modified and re-installed onto the phone. In the following year, modified firmwares for the Dream were developed and distributed by Android enthusiasts, One, maintained by a developer named JesusFreke, became popular among Dream owners. In August 2009, JesusFreke stopped work on his firmware, CyanogenMod grew in popularity, and a community of developers, called the CyanogenMod Team made contributions. Within a few months, the number of devices and features supported by CyanogenMod blossomed, similar to many open source projects, CyanogenMod was developed using a distributed revision control system with the official repositories being hosted on GitHub. Contributors submit new features or bugfix changes using Gerrit, contributions may be tested by anyone, voted up or down by registered users, and ultimately accepted into the code by one of a handful of CyanogenMod developers. A version of ADW. Launcher, a launcher for the Android operating system. As of version 9, CyanogenMods own launcher, Trebuchet, is included with the firmware, some unofficial builds for supported devices were listed in the CyanogenMod Wiki. The custom portions of CyanogenMod are primarily written by Cyanogen but include contributions from the xda-developers community, CyanogenMod 7 development began when Google released Android 2. 3s source code. On 15 February 2011, the first release candidates of CyanogenMod 7 were rolled out on several of the supported devices, the fourth release candidate was released on 30 March 2011 and brought increased support for the Nook Color and similar devices as well as many bug fixes. On 11 April 2011, the version of CyanogenMod 7.0 was released, based on Android 2.3.3. CyanogenMod 7.1 was released on 10 October 2011, based on Android 2.3.4. The latest stable version, CyanogenMod 7.2 was released on 16 June 2012, based on Android 2.3.7, bringing a predictive dialer, lock-screen updates, ICS animation backports
6.
Diaspora (software)
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Diaspora is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service. Installations of the software form nodes which make up the distributed Diaspora social network, the project was founded by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York Universitys Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The group received crowdfunding in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter, a consumer alpha version was released on 23 November 2010. Konrad Lawson, blogging for the Chronicle of Higher Education, suggested Diaspora in July 2011 as an alternative to corporately produced software and it allows its users to host their data with a traditional web host, a cloud-based host, an ISP, or a friend. The framework, which is being built on Ruby on Rails, is free software, a key part of the original Diaspora software design concept was that it should act as a social aggregator, allowing posts to be easily imported from Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. Instead, you can directly, securely, and without running exchanges past the prying eyes of Zuckerberg. As of 2016, the API for this feature was still under discussion, after the project raised over $200,000 in crowdfunding via the Kickstarter website by 1 June 2010, the group began working on the software. A developer preview with a number of security holes was released on 15 September 2010, on 23 November, a redesigned website was published in preparation for the alpha release, with the old site still available as a blog section. The early security holes were fixed with the alpha release, the early alpha version contained many bugs and security flaws, but feedback on the free software led to quick improvements. The softwares beta release was scheduled for November 2011, but was postponed due to the need to add new design features. In February 2012, the developers indicated that they had completed work on the software back-end to improve both pod up-time and website response time, the developers felt that allowing individual creativity in posts would differentiate the Diaspora platform from competitors. In June 2012, the development team was scheduled to move to Mountain View, in August 2012 the developers focus changed to working on creating makr. io, as part of their yCombinator class. In August 2012, the founders of Diaspora announced that they would let the community take over governance of the project, while they would stay involved, but take a lesser role. The project was adopted by, and became part of, the Free Software Support Network, which is in turn run by Eben Moglen, the FSSN acts as an umbrella organization to Diaspora development and manages Diasporas branding, finances and legal assets. In October 2012, the project made its first community release at 0.0.1.0, at the same time development was moved to a development branch, leaving the master branch for stable releases. Additionally, efforts were underway to package Diaspora for Linux distributions, Diaspora uses a semantic versioning scheme that is prefixed with another number which will be increased when necessary to indicate a major milestone for the project. These are the software versions released since community development started in August 2012
7.
Qt Project
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The Qt Project is a project to co-ordinate the development of the Qt software framework. The project was founded by Nokia, and has now led by Digia’s subsidiary The Qt Company since it acquired Qt software technologies, trademarks. Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng began development of Qt in 1991, three years before the company was incorporated as Quasar Technologies, then changed the name to Troll Tech, until version 1.45, source code for Qt was released under the Qt Free Edition License. Controversy arose around 1998 when it became clear that KDE’s K Desktop Environment was going to one of the leading desktop environments for Linux. As it was based on Qt, many people in the free software movement worried that a piece of one of their major operating systems would be proprietary. With the release of version 2.0 of the toolkit, the license was changed to the Q Public License, a free software license but one regarded by the Free Software Foundation as incompatible with the GPL. Compromises were sought between KDE and Trolltech whereby Qt would not be able to fall under a restrictive license than the QPL. This led to the creation of the KDE Free Qt Foundation which guarantees that Qt would fall under a BSD-style license should no free/open source version of Qt be released during 12 months. In 2000, Qt 2.2 was released under the GPL v2, on 28 January 2008 Nokia announced to acquire Trolltech. On 14 January 2009 Qt version 4.5 was relicensed, the Qt Project was founded on 21 October 2011. In August 2012 Digia announced to all rights to Qt. The Qt Project is not a legal entity or organization. Qts Open Governance is modelled after WebKits, decision-making takes place in a process the project describes as lazy consensus. The project facilitates online communication among its developers and community members through public forums, mailing lists, aside from the project leader Digia and various individuals, a number of other organizations participate in the Qt Project. Second-largest Qt contributor is KDAB, a Swedish Qt consulting company, KDAB is involved in many areas, including maintenance of several components. KDAB together with RIM/BlackBerry are maintaining the QNX and BlackBerry 10 ports of Qt, another big participator is Intel, contributing for example Wayland support. AudioCodes maintains IBM ClearCase support in Qt Creator, various individuals from KDE implement features from KDE Frameworks in Qt. Official website Qt website KDE Free Qt Foundation Qt Project statistics
8.
Discourse (software)
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Discourse is an open source Internet forum and mailing list management software application founded in 2013 by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam Saffron. Discourse received funding from First Round Capital and Greylock Partners, however, the stated goals of the project are social rather than technical, to improve online discussion quality through improved forum software. The application is written in JavaScript and Ruby on Rails and uses the Ember. js framework, postgreSQL serves as its back-end database management system. The sourcecode is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2
